When you work in WordPress day after day, sometimes you want to let loose a little. Maybe you can’t do it on your clients’ sites, but on your own…well, most things are fair game. Especially if you have a hobby blog where people may expect a little more personality and fun. After poking around some odd places on the internet, I’ve uncovered some just plain weird WordPress plugins that can make your websites shine and sparkle…maybe even literally.
1. Cornify
You don’t want people to leave your site. You want as many eyes on your page as you can possibly get. So how do you prevent them from ever looking away? You make unicorns appear and grab their attention again! That’s how. With Cornify, after 5 seconds of inactivity, your users’ screens are, well…cornified. Unicorns pop up and dance. It’s pretty weird. And I have to say that, personally at least, this is one of my favorite WordPress plugins that I have ever seen. Is it relatively useless? Well, yeah. But it’s too weird not to love.
2. Content Randomizer
While it’s not necessarily a weird thing to show something random on your site (like a joke or an image or discounts or link roundup on a 404 page or whatever), if you think creatively, you can absolutely use Content Randomizer to make your users think that something definitely weird is going on — when in fact it’s going according to plan. With a simple shortcode implementation, you can dictate what pages you have random content to cycle between. Let’s say on April Fool’s Day, you have a deal that’s too good to be true. With content randomizer, you can literally make it too good to be true because the deal will never show up, and they will be taken to random pages on your site and see random content. Have fun with this one.
3. Gigantic Cursor…WTF?
Thanks to Media Temple for showing me this snippet. But if you add a simple line of CSS into your theme files (just go to Appearance – Customize – Additonal CSS or Divi – Theme Options – Custom CSS), your visitors will navigate to your site and as soon as they move their mouse over whatever element you indicated via CSS, their cursor will grow by leaps and bounds. And they will definitely wonder what in the world is going on.
body {
cursor: url(https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s.cdpn.io/3/np_cursor_740125_000000.png), default;
}
4. A Whole Repo of PHP and CSS Pranks
GitHub user rhspeer knows what’s up when it comes to pranking users. They have put together a compilation of pranks and weirdness that you can add to your site as you wish. It uses PHP and CSS to make your site change everything to Comic Sans or turn the user’s screen grayscale. While they’re labeled as April Fool’s jokes, I think the repo title has a more appropriate title: Joy.
5. Comcastify.js
Many of you are well aware of The Onion’s Andrew Kos. He’s the internet’s go-to funnyman. But I think I might have found his magnum opus. His masterpiece that will go down in the annals of of internet history: Comcastify.js. As the readme.md says…
I mean, we’re sure he’s not calling it that for any specific reason. It just rolls off the tongue too well not to call it that. Yep. That’s it. Sure.
6. Logout Roulette
Don’t you just love when a website logs you out randomly? Of course you do! Why not make that happen a good 10% of the time with Logout Roulette, then? 1 in every 10 page loads from your admin panel, this plugin will log you out. Talk about weird WordPress plugins, right? Who’d want that? You? Maybe. But it’s a good way to either prank your staff or just kind of…I don’t know…take a break?
See? Doesn’t that sounds like fun? No? Well, it sure is weird, though. You gotta admit that.
Note: this plugin shows it hasn’t been updated in 3 releases as of this writing, but having tested it with WordPress 4.9.8, I can absolutely tell you that it works exactly like it’s supposed to.
Go On, Be Weird
As you can see, there are plenty of weird WordPress plugins ways that can spice up your site. Or you can play pranks on your website visitors via CSS or JavaScript in the style of Andrew Kos. The best part is that they’re all harmless. (Well, maybe the Logout Randomizer could cause problems for some folks, but the rest won’t.) You don’t want to do anything truly detrimental to your users or your staff. But you may want to spice things up and make someone laugh. And some of these oddities are definitely going to do that.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen on a website?
Article featured image by Malchev / shutterstock.com
The post 6 Weird WordPress Plugins and Pranks That are Just For Fun appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.
